Lifestyle West Blog

The Daytrip of Your Dreams: From your Kelowna Hotel to Space and Back

Best Western Kelowna Hotel asks: Is a vacation in space on your bucket list? Well, you’re in luck. If you have $100,000, that is.

Start your holiday planning with a search for hotels in Kelowna so you can enjoy the Okanagan—a down to earth destination if there is one—and end your itinerary with a jaunt in space, 100,000 kilometres above earth.

That’s right, in less than a year you’ll have not just one but two options for travel to the final frontier.

An artist's rendering of the Lynx Mark 1 shows how the space shuttle will blast off from earth to give private suborbital passengers an extraordinary view of earth.

The Canadian tourism agency Uniktour has just announced it will compete against Virgin Galactic to offer space travel by 2014. Uniktour, based in Montreal, has teamed up with XCOR Aerospace and Space Expedition Corp. to offer private travel to space-bound Canadians.

Space travel voyages booked through Uniktour launch from the Mojave desert, but fares don’t include travel from your hotel in Kelowna to California. You will, however, receive personal astronaut training. And, once you’re in the tiny space shuttle, it’s just you and a pilot bound for space. The shuttles will make four trips daily.

Virgin Galactic’s suborbital trips, however, will take six tourists into space once a day, and cost nearly $200,000.